Pseudo-physical interaction with a virtual car interior in immersive environments
Mathias Moehring, Bernd Froehlich · 2005
The use of Virtual Reality technology for the product engineering process in the automotive industry has a lot of po-tential – in particular in the area of usability and reachability studies. We analyzed the manipulation of knobs, con-trols, flaps, mirrors and other components in a real car and classified them with respect to their constraints. Based on this classification, we developed a set of pseudo-physical direct interaction techniques, which closely approximate the real world behavior without employing a force-feedback device. Our approach uses a hierarchical grasp heuristic to decouple the interaction from the collision of the fingers with the virtual car components. This approach makes the in-teraction more robust while no haptic feedback is available. A pilot study of our implementation revealed that our di-rect manipulation techniques are a good step towards more realistic interaction with virtual car interiors.